Infiniti’s plan to carve out a ten per cent niche of the global luxury car market by 2020 will be headed by a new flagship car rather than a premium-priced SUV.

The model is widely rumoured to be a hybrid-powered supercar with technical input from Red Bull Racing, although Infiniti maintains that the layout of the supercar - whether it has a front or mid-engined powertrain - still has to be decided.

"I’ll leave you to decide whether our new flagship is a saloon, coupe or supercar, but it will be a car. We won’t have an SUV like it is now," Infiniti president Johan de Nysschen said ahead of the Frankfurt motor show.

Infiniti has developed both supercar and coupé concepts - the Emerg-E and the Essence - although the Emerg-E makes a more logical link with the F1 sponsorship of Red Bull Racing.

The new flagship is an integral part of an expansion plan that kicks off at Frankfurt this week with a concept for a new 4.4m long hatchback, the Q30, to battle the Audi A3 and BMW 1-series.

Infiniti’s nine-model range will be expanded by 60 per cent to 14 models by 2020, with a sales projection of up to 500,000 cars per year.

‘We have no ambition to expand Infiniti to one million or 1.5m cars per year, but we will have a very healthy business when we approach 400k to 500k,’ says de Nysschen.